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Prizmo 1.2
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Are you looking for a reliable scanning application with OCR? (Optical character recognition)As Prizmo works both with regular scanners (under Snow Leopard) and digital cameras, it will help you scan any kinds of documents.
? Documents of all sizes (regular formats like US Letter, US Legal, A4, and custom) ? Portrait and landscape documents ? Indoor and outdoor photographs… How does it work?
2. Import it into Prizmo 3. Select the part of the photograph you need 4. Change brightness, contrast, height and width… 5. Perform OCR in one of the 10 languages available: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian 6. Save the result as a text file (pdf, rtf, txt) or an image file (jpg, png, tiff) 7. Send the image by email, print it, save it on your computer or on an external disk… as you like it! Which Features?
? Lens distortion correction ? Real-time preview ? State-of-the-art OCR technology from a world famous OCR specialist, ExperExchange Inc. (the company behind TypeReader Professional) ? Spotlight indexable results ? Scanner support under Snow Leopard. What is said about Prizmo? “Prizmo’s optical character recognition abilities are impressive. It does a good job of recognizing printed type, not just in a flat image but also in distorted, perspective-altered camera images. Suddenly those off-the-cuff, spontaneous images are usable again.” (by Linda Maloney – MacNN) “I tried the software on four different documents, all white paper with black text and attempted a number of different angled photographs. Happily and almost surprisingly they all worked perfectly. The amount of image control in Prizmo is impressive for a $40 application. (by David – www.totalapps.net) “My results were great, despite not being able to calibrate for lens distortion, and it could definitely act as my only scanner. But, it really isn’t only a scanner, it can be used on anything. If you see a movie poster or an ad that you like, and would like to have documented, just take a picture, and Prizmo will help you with perspective, cropping and everything else.” (by Joe Turner – MacApper) Which Requirements? Want more information? Creaceed is a Belgian company with a passionate team experienced in signal and image processing, which provides intuitive and easy to use creative applications to Mac professionals and consumers. |
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:34 pm
OCR feature looks cool, but how can I test its accuracy? Attempts to copy the recognized test result in “Feature not available” warning dialog.
I would be nice if you can use the built-in iSight to take a picture and import into Prizmo directly.
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:11 am
On the same problem as Hiro: too many developers cripple the high end functionality of their applications so that it is impossible to fully test. Why can’t they find a different restriction.
After a long fruitless search for a decent OCR this looks very promising. But all I have seen so far could just be a different photographic representation with no or very little true OCR.
I am not going to buy without a decent test. What a pity after the buildup.
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:25 am
Same here – a test drive for an OCR app without giving the opportunity to actually test the text recognition is IMHO simply idiotic. I end up with a JPG – which is exactly what I started with… I hardly need an OCR app for that.
If I was sure it worked I would buy it stante pede!
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:25 am
I am on the same page as Hiro and zotzoot. I am especially interested in OCR and would like to compare Prizmos OCR capabilities against PDFpen and the new OCRkit.
Prismo shows its OCR results on the screen but doesn’t allow to copy text to take a closer look (as far I can see at least). However, I tried a one page document in landscape format and the results are less as good as PDFpen or OCRkit. This was just a quick test and it might be possible to adjust the results but as long as I can’t proper save or copy the results I won’t spend more time for testing.
In addition I was surprised that Prismo doesn’t supports PDFs. I had to save the PDF as a JPG to do the test.
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:48 am
Amendment: I just checked a screencast. It’s supposed to indicate text recognized and display the text on mouseover. So apparently it doesn’t work for me at all. I’ve tried on some pictures I made of a recipe in a newspaper and it doesn’t recognize any text at all. Oh, well.
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:18 am
I bought this a while back and it is the REAL THING. When I first tried the demo, I had a problem with the ocr function not working and was just about to email the dev until I remembered a key fact: OCR works thru the scanner and only if the scanner is turned on and connected to the testing computer. Once I fixed that problem, everything worked just fine and I was blown away at how good it was.
Now all I have to do is get me and the receipts close enough to the scanned to let Prizmo do its thing.
I also had left a critical receipt I needed for tax purposes at my daughter’s house 1200 miles away and neither of us are good with snail mail so I had her send me a jpg of the receipt which I then imported into Prizmo and ocr’d so I could cut and paste the data to the tax forms
Pver the years, I have gone thru a lot of ocr apps and this one is the best one I have used ever.
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:34 am
giltian said:
“OCR works thru the scanner and only if the scanner is turned on and connected to the testing computer. Once I fixed that problem, everything worked just fine and I was blown away at how good it was.”
I am a bit puzzled because the webpage from the developers states the exact opposite:
“…From now on, if you can take a picture of something with your digital camera, you don’t need to buy a scanner anymore. … We integrated the technology of a world famous OCR specialist, ExperExchange Inc., into Prizmo, and released a user-friendly and reliable solution all Mac users can afford. So, you can really do without a scanner, even more now. …”
Any clarification from the developers?
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:40 am
Hi guys,
the OCR quality depends of course on the quality of input image. Just a quick note though: the OCR engine is from our partner ExperVision, and is the same as Typereader (395$). You can view OCR results within Prizmo (no export) with the demo version, it appears at the top of the window when you select a text block.
For the PDF input, will be a free upgrade in an upcoming release this year, along with other exciting new features.
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:43 am
At the start Prizmo was a “camera only” solution. Then we added OCR and people started to ask for scanner support as well. So we added that (Snow Leopard only).
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:43 am
Hmm. I took a quick test with the integrated iSight (picture of printed text, not a newspaper), OCRed the flipped text and got 8 rows of l!lt tll: lfs! lllI ii;l llll lll l!¡. That’s not what I expected. But I will probably do another test in the evening.
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:25 am
I just tried OCR. It works quite well, tough there are massive problems with special characters like german double quotes. Anyway, having a look at the menu options I believe that Prizmo does not only require a registration but also needs to phone home to an online activation server. That’s why it doesn’t come into consideration, regardless of it’s capabilities.
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:41 am
I’d like to like this, but as others have said, it’s very difficult to test the comparative quality of OCR output by simply looking at text on screen. The example of Rtf OCR on page 18 of the User Guide is not encouraging. Is this commendable honesty on the part of the developer, or?
February 3rd, 2010 at 6:35 am
Hi,
I am the one who wrote Prizmo’s user guide. I wanted to be honest indeed. I could have made a perfect example without a single mistake but OCR is very seldom perfect.
What is more, OCR accuracy is highly related to binarization. You should try to move the slider to get the best result. I made a screencast explaining how it works.
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:12 am
How does it work compared to Adobe Acrobat? I usually OCR through Acrobat, but that solution isn’t perfect either. I’ve looked at ReadIris and all they seem to be about is taking your money.
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:58 am
ABBYY recently released a Mac version of its OCR tool, ABBYY FineReader Express Edition for Mac, which I haven’t tried. If it is as good as the Windows version, it should be excellent.
DEVONthink Pro Office on Mac is great and has OCR capabilities (based on the FineReader engine).
February 3rd, 2010 at 10:30 am
I really can’t get the OCR to work at all. No matter what I try, there is only very occasionally any obvious activity when I click the OCR button and when I do get any sort of result it’s garbage. I want to like this app, but I’m afraid on the basis of what I’ve seen it’s a non-starter for me. I’m scanning clean, mainly graphics free documents direct from a Canon 8400f using the instructions in the screencast and am getting no meaningful results at the moment – very frustrating!
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Nope – I’m still not able to get anything but garbage out of this (when it actually attempts to ‘recognize text’ – which isn’t very often) and I’ve really tried very hard. I can’t understand how so many reviewers rate it so highly unless I’m doing something very wrong. Sorry, but for me, it’s just a hugely frustrating app that simply doesn’t work as advertised – treat with caution…
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Write to contact at creaceed dot com if you need help.
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:57 pm
I just downloaded the demo and the OCR worked fine on a fax document I received in a TIFF format. After clicking on Recognize Text, if I do a mouseover on the image, the recognized text appears at the top of the window. It did an excellent job but it was a clean document also.
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:14 pm
Seemed to work well for me (1 was an i in one spot). Didn’t seem to work with scanned PDFs, but that isn’t a real big issue (can convert with preview). The ability to OCR from skewed photos is a neat trick, though I wonder if I ever would do that. Still, very corporate spy like.
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:38 pm
I have been looking for a good scanner app, however even with Snow Leopard my scanner (HPC7280) does not show up so no scanning for me. BTW the ability to easily fix distorted pics is great.